MAGDALEN VAUGHN
Biography
Magdalen Vaughn (MFA, BA) is a Houston-born actor, accent coach, writer, producer and curator with over a decade of performance, coaching, and executive arts leadership experience across the US and UK. She holds a Master of Fine Arts in Acting from the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland ‘21 and a Bachelor of Arts from The University of Chicago ‘14. Her deep passion for global cultures and vocal technique, and her extensive experience as a performer, has generated rave reviews like, “Working with [Magdalen] a few times, I admired the work and dedication she put into all of her characters and wanted my actors to have that same skill set. After we set up a few sessions, she made my actors very comfortable. Maggie was able to diminish the fear that goes into learning an accent and broke it all down into baby steps.”
As an educator and coach, Magdalen specializes in physiological and research-driven actor training. Currently working toward certification in Knight Thompson Speechwork (KTS), her pedagogy integrates an exploratory accent-work with embodied performance techniques, empowering actors to achieve deep character transformation and vocal authenticity. Her private accent clients span international markets—including Texas, Los Angeles, New York and the UK—alongside vocal direction and coaching for regional theatres like Stageworks, Cone Man Running, Creative Movement Practices, Zoom Shakespeare, and Stoic Theatre. She also taught theatre at Elkins High School in 2022.
Beyond coaching, Magdalen has versatile performance experience across classical theater, immersive environments, film, and new media. Her acting credits include Miss LaRaj’s House of Dystopian Futures (Catastrophic Theatre); Macbeth and Treasure Island (Creative Movement Practices); Widows (dir. Steve McQueen); Ariadne (Rec Room Writers Group); Fando y Lis (Manifiesto Escenico); Clickhole's “Splitscreen” (The Onion); Midnight High, Synapse and Advance Man (The Octarine Accord); and Mary Shelley Sees the Future (The Runaways Lab Theatre). She is a former Managing Director of Chicago’s avant-garde Runaways Lab Theatre and Associate Artist at Salonathon in Chicago. She frequently devises and produces original work, focusing particularly on sci-fi and stories about mental health/recovery. Today you can find her passionately involved in Houston Theatre, as a coach, actor, member of The Octarine Accord's Leadership Team, and founder/curator of the art-collective VOID OF FORM.